


Reversed World

by apollos



Category: Naruto
Genre: Bitterness, Canon Compliant, F/M, Falling In Love, First Time, Friends to Lovers, Tarot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-12
Updated: 2018-11-12
Packaged: 2019-08-22 13:28:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,006
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16598801
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apollos/pseuds/apollos
Summary: Upright: completeness, wholeness. Reversed: incompleteness, emptiness.Tenten and realizations about Neji and about being a ninja. (Firmly anti-Naruto's-ending.)





	Reversed World

Love grows in metered movements. Tenten learns this, though not consciously; much in the same unconscious way she gravitates towards Neji, closes the distance—though, is it him that does that, too?—until there is no space between them, until the natural thing to do is to be together, to fall into one another.

Looking back, she can take stock of certain moments. Twelve, thirteen, fourteen—these are precarious ages. Your bodies are live wires, the world a dangerous pool. Tenten's civilian friends in the orphans' quarter, whom she falls out of contact with eventually but again, not all at once, start studying more seriously, start wearing makeup and doing their hair, start thinking about boys. She cannot relate. She has been trained. She has, she starts to think later in life, been brainwashed. The goal is not to delay development—the goal is to deter it entirely. Ninjas are not supposed to love, not really, and most marriages in the ninja clans are ones of convenience, a ninja to a civilian, a wife or husband to rear the treasured heir while the other serves the village. Again and again, ninja-ninja marriages end in tragedy, in death, an awful occurrence rendered mundane by frequency. Children don't learn these things at the Academy. Of course they don't.

But: Tenten is fifteen, and again she will know this is entirely too young in the future but she's not aware of this now, feeling she's lived four times the lifetimes of the friends she has now left behind. She and Neji are returning from a mission they'd been on just the two of them, traipsing through the forest at night, sleeping during the day, it's enemy territory, dangerous. Absurdly large trees make up this part of the continent; some ninjas live among them in complicated villages with bridges strung between the treetops, because large land predators lurk below. All-in-all, it's dangerous, rough. Tenten's roughest mission yet. They've been at it for three and a half weeks. Tenten craves home, and perhaps she clings to Neji a bit more consciously, everything about him comfortable, familiar, home-like. He smells like clean sheets and his skin, in what little contact she gets, is so smooth. His eyes hold all the expressions they have ever exchanged. They can go days at a time without talking; or perhaps she forgets when they  _do_ talk, the dialogue feeling no different than the thoughts in her head. All together: homelike, familiar, comfortable, needed.

Five thirty-five A.M., sun getting ready to rise, Neji and Tenten hiding out in an abandoned hollow in the middle of one tree. Tenten has disguise scrolls that, with a carefully enough summoning practice, should be able to keep them safe during the morning hours. Once the sun fully rises and the heat kicks up, they'll move out again. Until then, sleep. Tenten swiftly prepares the scroll; Neji sits in the middle of the hollow, cross-legged, Byakugan on, scanning. Strange blue pre-morning light flows through the entrance of the hollow. They finish their jobs simultaneously.

"All clear," he announces.

Tenten backs away from the hollow. They can see out, through a glimmering sheen, but from the outside, it should look like any other tree in the forest. Their chakra signatures might give them away—Tenten is feeling particularly exhausted, uncertain if she'd worked the jutsu to completion—but on the other hand, nobody should be looking for them. This is what's on her mind as she asks, "Neji, what has been your hardest mission?"

"Sasuke's failed retrieval," he says, his voice catching just the slightest on the  _failed_.

"Ah." Tenten lays down on the floor of the hollow. There's no time for bedrolls, and the floor is hard and rough, but she's accustomed to it. She has spent much time hitting a tree with her shin so that the bone breaks just the slightest and heals stronger. She has trained her body. She watches through drooping eyes at Neji unfolds his limbs and relaxes as well. It's a beautiful motion, one she's come to know and treasure, the soft rustling and laying of his robes, the way he lets his hair out of its loose hold, the way the strands fall across his shoulders, the way he tucks the ribbon into a hidden pocket. A day seeming for questions, her mind floating in the nether of exhaustion, she says, "I've always wanted to know. What's with the Hyuga hair?"

Neji smiles—again, just the slightest of movements. Things she doesn't even take stock of anymore. Things only perceptible to her. "It is tradition," he answers simply. "I'm not sure why. An elder can tell you, most likely, but I haven't been taught much about the clan's history. All I know is that the men never cut their hair, while the women cut it short until they come of age, at which point they let it grow. Perhaps something to do with maturity, and as you might say, the patriarchal privileging of masculinity."

"Fascinating," Tenten says, and she means it. She catches his teasing at the last part; and in their gaze, they both acknowledge and overcome that. "If you had a child, would you follow the tradition?"

Neji's crinkle furrows. "Of course," he says. "Why wouldn't I? It's not—it's not like the seal. It's…it's something that distinguishes us, like our clothes. An inoffensive and pleasant reminder of the past."

"I wouldn't know."

Neji's lips part and he sighs. The only problem with their disguise is that it lets the light in, so Tenten can see every expression and move he makes, and she knows she's upset him. "I—I'm sorry, Tenten. I forgot."

"Oh. You thought—yes, I wouldn't know, because I don't have any family. No traditions. But I don't mean to be sad about that." Tenten rolls from her side to her back, a strange urge to unfurl coming over her. To bare herself. "It's just a fact. I don't know what traditions are like; but I don't particularly notice their absence, either."

"I just mean—" and from the corner of her eyes, Tenten can see him moving just the bit closer— "you know, sometimes it's hard for me. To remember that not everybody shares my experience. It has always been hard for me. I can be a rather selfish person."

"I know, Neji." Tenten rolls her head over to him, surprised to see they're nearly side-by-side, certain they'd started this conversation on opposite ends. Perhaps the hollow is not as big as she thought. "This is such a heavy conversation, and we're so very tired, perhaps now is not the time—"

With a measured exhalation of breath that Tenten can both hear and feel, Neji puts a hand on her thigh.

" _Not the time_ ," he repeats.

In that moment of eye contact, much like before, Tenten understands exactly what he is trying to convey: there is no such thing as a bad time for a shinobi.

Of course, this moment stands as the most obvious in Tenten's memory, because it  _did_ mark when they reached that tipping point. What happens next is to be expected: Tenten kisses him, certain that's what he wants, and what she wants, too, still not quite aware, but feeling it as naturally as anything else; he kisses back, affirms everything she's thinking; and much as they have only really been trained to kill, they have only really be trained to take everything to its logical conclusion, and by the light of the rising sun in the jungle she takes him in, fully, completely, permanently. There are tears. There are declarations of love. There is a heavy certainty that Tenten feels, an inevitability they will eventually reach—little and big deaths both conflated, the erotic necessarily entangled with the morbid, and she clings to his shoulders through that elegant white robe, still somehow so clean and soft, and in a single broken moment she begs him not to leave her, and he to her, both knowing the ultimate futility.  
But before that—

She notices him in the Academy, and until years later forgets that she tells her civilian friends about a strange boy with strange eyes. She didn't recognize him as cute, then—she didn't have the words. She thinks a lot about when her feelings about him  _physically_ started to change, because they  _did_ , but so unnoticedly—eventually she accepted that he was beautiful, and that in rare moments when their lives were not endangered or they were practicing for that inevitable endangerment, she would feel  _something,_ in nearly every quadrant of her body, a flooding and flushing similar and different from the thrill after a good fight. Sometimes, at night, she'd dream about him, always the same, strange dream: slowly, ceremoniously undressing him, taking stock of his body, and then fisting her hands in his hair and bringing his head to her chest.

She sees Lee shirtless first, when an immediate wound must be attended to in the beginning days of their training; she registers the nudity as nothing. Neji, more reserved and more adept, keeps his clothes on until on a routine mission when he must wash a large quantity of caked mud from his hair in a river. He removes his jacket and sets it aside. Sitting with her feet in the water, Tenten turns from him, unsure why she feels the urge to avert her eyes. She puts the non-work-related feeling into the box with all the rest that she always fails to open after the mission ceases. ( _To be a ninja is to compartmentalize. To be a ninja is to accept._  To be a ninja is to repress.)

Similarly, she goes out of her way to ensure neither of her teammates see her reapply her chest bindings, except in the most dire of medical circumstances; similarly, she ignores the fact that sometimes she  _wants_ Neji to see her do that, and sometimes she stretches just a  _bit_ farther than necessary after a practice, placing the heel of her hands down on her thighs and bending backwards.

She asks Ino to do her makeup for the next round of the Chuunin exams, and she breaks out her favorite blouse. Ino, of course, asks who she's trying to impress. "Nobody," Tenten says sternly. "It's a special occasion, and I'm proud of my teammate." So proud; she cheers, and her breath hitches when he loses, and she knows—there's a different twist to the concern she feels for Neji than for Lee—a concern of the marring of beauty, and the reducing of functioning of the body not for the purpose of work, but for the purpose of—that part, she's not quite sure.

Yet it is not all physical. She has an easier time with the emotional. She knows she feels close to Neji, so close, and in a different way than she feels close to Gai and Lee. After the Chuunin exams, after she visits Neji in the hospital—she starts to share her real thoughts with him, and he with her in return, and so often they find themselves off to the side. It's  _easier_ , is the thing. He already knows; there's nothing to explain. And this is not just in relation to Gai and Lee's antics, no—any of the rare social events of the burgeoning ninja class, anything to celebrate or commemorate, Tenten and Neji stay together. They watch Lee flirt with Sakura unsuccessfully, or Gai get drunk with the other Jonin, or Kiba show off Akamaru's new tricks, and when they laugh together, they know they're sharing the same joke. And when they share the same look when somebody mentions Sasuke, or when Hinata walks by looking a little lost without Naruto to look for, or when political difficulties start to creep into conversations, they know they're thinking the same thoughts. It never surprises Tenten when they agree; it surprises her more when they disagree.

Inside jokes form. You don't know they're inside jokes until you laugh at something and nobody else gets it; Tenten waves it off. Sometimes the other girls ask her how she got Neji to crack. "Aren't you close with your male teammates, too?" she asks, and that's answer enough.

But it's not the same with Lee. And she knows it's not the same between Ino and Shikamaru, or Shino and Hinata. The back of their hands do not brush when they stand next to each other; they do not float to the back of the room to discuss something in a whisper without realizing it; they do not keep track of where the other is in the room at all times, and become panicked if they lose sight.

At some point in the nebulous years of adolescence, before they have sex but after his realization at the hands of Naruto, she tells his fortune. He doesn't ask. They're on the training field, done for the day, but being held by Gai, who wants to get team dinner. A rare moment of peace; Tenten takes her tarot cards from her bag.

Neji knows her hobby, but still his eyebrows raise when she settles in front of him. "Why do you have those?"

Tenten shrugs. "I take them with me everywhere," she says. "They're all that's left, the people at the orphanage told me they were my mother's."

"Oh."

"You know," she says, preparing the deck, "you have to be gifted tarot cards, or else they don't work."

"Sure." Neji's lips quirk.

Tenten flips over a card, and then another, and she explains it to him. He's bemused, leaning back with the heels of his hand in the dirt, his legs cross. Their knees nearly touch. "I have to be honest," Tenten says. "Your future doesn't look very bright." She sucks her bottom lip between her teeth, narrows her eyebrows.

Neji laughs. "I'm not surprised," he says.

"Still the pessimist." She brings the tarot cards back together, puts them in their case, not liking the energy buzzing from them. It feels like treacherous chakra, like being hit upside the head by an enemy. "I thought we were past that, Neji."

"To live life with no hopes is to never be disappointed." Neji sits up, wiping his palms on his pants. There's a rip in them from training earlier, revealing a slice of his thigh, that Tenten lingers on for perhaps a moment too long. Neji notices. Neji says nothing about that, instead, "So I try to manage my expectations."

Tenten shakes her head. "A life without hope is no life at all," she says, trying to be cheery. "I can't believe we disagree on such a basic thing."

"It's not basic. It's plagued philosophers for several centuries." Neji gives her an incredulous look, one that makes her laugh; careless invalidation of his careful philosophy truly befuddles him.

Tenten stands and offers a hand. "Come on," she says. "Gai and Lee look like they're about to launch into a speech, and we need to be their peanut gallery."

So, really, what happens in the tree hollow, and what happens again and again until Neji dies in his late teens, always feels to Tenten as a natural progression of life, as the simplest thing foretold in a fortune. And as in the fortune, Neji dies in a death that Tenten always labels as stupid, ridiculous, preventable, but that's so typical of ninja deaths, they happen so fast, so often—Neji falls out of conversation eventually, just like all the deceased, your final death the time when nobody remembers your name—but still, she's  _angry_.She's so angry. She's angry at him, at the world, at everything. All she wanted was to be a ninja; all she wanted was to be a strong woman; and she's angry with herself, too, because one single love is enough to undo her. (Neji was no regular civilian man who gets drunk and beats his wife and children, she reminds herself. He wasn't uncouth, or rude. He never viewed women as inferior, once he stopped viewing  _everybody_ as inferior. To be made undone by a love so pure and kind and rare—well, it's nobler, it's understandable.) She gets fed up when she watches Lee's son—Lee thought he could have it, too, a ninja-ninja relationship, only to find his wife die another  _stupid_ ,  _ridiculous, preventable_ death in the line of duty—rank up in the ninja world, and when everybody sprouts the same old bullshit. Change—she and Neji were  _certain_ things were going to change. She knows Neji started feeling hope, and she thinks she might have had something to do with that, could feel the slow changes in him in the way that he held her close to his chest, perceiving the difference in his heartbeat. Beyond this small scale, so insignificant to everybody else but the most important thing in Tenten's life, change does not happen. Tenten works at her shop, and she makes little money because times are peaceful, and yet she watches generation after generation of child soldiers march to the front lines, and when she tries to talk to all of her old civilian friends, they cannot understand. She petitions Naruto. It falls on deaf ears. She pleads to Hinata. She is blinded by the glory of her life, the living husband, the beautiful children, the prosperous village.

Tenten cannot love again. She let Neji undo the bindings of her training, as she undid his, as he undid her hair and she undid his robes; they pressed bare forehead to bare forehead, Konoha forgotten, discarded. So natural, so easy, she's been so spoiled, incapable of loving anybody but him. When the first is the best, the first is the last. The beginning is the ending.

To be a ninja—the final step in her idolization and romanticism of the career: the realization that there is no ideal, no romance, no glory. Even in times of peace. Especially in times of peace.


End file.
